Can Brushing Your Hair Be Art? Molly Surno Makes Music Out of the Everyday Ritual at BAM Tonight

Imagine the sound that forms when you brush your hair. Is it oceanic? The crackle of a record player? Or more violent? This is the spectrum that artist Molly Surno and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s Brian Chase will capture tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, when they amplify the noise of 20 men brushing one another’s hair over the course of a choreographed 40 minutes called “We of Me” before a sold-out audience.

The resulting audio, created using handcrafted mic’d brushes, is just the tip of the proverbial performance iceberg. “This piece is so much about the collective experience of listening, how sound affects our bodies, how touch and watching people being touched [affects our bodies]—there’s a very physical component,” says Surno, who has spent much of her career examining daily grooming rituals. Taking the brush out of the bedroom and putting it in front of an audience activates the ego, she explains, as something you once did mindlessly in private becomes a spectacle for others. Turning the brush over to a partner adds another layer to the conversation: Now, another person has a hand in defining you.

“Women are very much participatory in this ‘touch economy,’ where we pay people to [give us] manicures, dye our hair. It’s part of our experience,” says Surno. For the all male cast, a different tension arises. “There’s much more hesitation. The male body is a more aggressive space—you don’t really see 20 men together unless it’s a sports team.” Gone are the connotations of female grooming (the goal of which may be to appear sexually pleasing, at the cost of masochism), and instead, “an implied eroticism” arises. While the audience lounges on yoga cushions in the relaxed theater, they will watch the mundane become ceremonial as the “brushers” turn their backs to the audience, change partners, or come together for a “daisy chain” of combing. In the days and weeks that follow, if those in attendance don’t consciously reconsider the act of grooming, at the very least they will start to listen.